Are you ready for some football?!

Wait – there’s something wrong with that. Let’s try again…

Are you ready for some CHATTER?!?

There that’s better, although given the recent news, either title is really appropriate. Salesforce is gearing up for the primetime & plans to introduce the whole world to Chatter. And what better timing for me to do a Chatter post, seeing as my org just went live with it one week ago.

Probably the trickiest part about Chatter is that it’s an all-or-nothing features, and it’s a visible one to boot. We had to make sure that we did the proper prep work for go-live. And since our execs were already excited about Chatter Free, we really needed the initial rollout with the current Salesforce base to go well.

So how did we do it? First, we used our UAT sandbox to do some beta testing & gather reactions. This accomplished two things – we actually got the feedback (a lot of which was useful), but it also helped to build a buzz around Chatter & got people excited about what it was.

Secondly, we made a go-live plan. First, we decided to turn Chatter on over the weekend. This is mostly due to the fact that it’s a significant change to the UI & we didn’t want people freaking out. (You know how antsy end users get when just a field moves, heaven forbid a whole new section being added.) The weekend rollout also gave us time to add some meat to the bones of Chatter. We created some groups to mimic teams & pre-populated them with members. We also had team leaders & users involved in the beta log in & update their profile. This way, when all the new users logged in, they got a sense of what they were supposed to be doing.

Finally (which we actually did before the other two parts), we had a quick over view and Q&A session the Friday before go-live. These was more to prepare everyone for the change rather than to train them. (Let’s face it, Chatter is pretty intuitive.)

One tip that I think has help us immensely – We created a few general groups that we added everyone to (Chatter Feedback and Getting Started with Chatter). These have had a ton of traffic, but the great thing is that the Salesforce Experts are not the ones answering the questions here. Users are helping users, which is exactly what Chatter is about.

Have you gone live with Chatter? And if you have, what lessons about you learned? What would you have changed about your rollout?